Houdini in the Desert

The greatest collection of magic in the world lies hidden inside a nondescript Las Vegas warehouse. Want access? At midnight, press the mannequin's brassiere.

Enter the showroom of what appears to be a mail-order lingerie warehouse in an industrial section of Las Vegas. Press a button hidden in a mannequin's brassiere and a secret door swings wide, revealing an Ali Baba's trove of sports cars, vintage automatons, gargoyle heads, gadgetry and an electric chair. It's the secret workshop of David Copperfield, magician extraordinaire, whom FORBES visited one midnight. Here he keeps 80,000 books, illusions, posters and memorabilia that together conjure up the whole history of magic.

For magic aficionados this private collection--which Copperfield calls the International Museum & Library of the Conjuring Arts--might as well be the Vatican. If Copperfield himself is present, as he was for us, it's like having Michelangelo show you around. Few people other than magic scholars ever get the privilege of entering.

Born David Kotkin, Copperfield, 49, is the most commercially successful magician in history. In 1995 he ranked 6th on the Forbes
Celebrity
100 list, having earned $52 million. Over the course of his career he's sold 40 million tickets and grossed over a billion dollars.

Starting in 1991, when for $2.2 million he bought the Mulholland Library of Conjuring & the Allied Arts (containing the world's largest collection of Houdini memorabilia), Copperfield and his agents have scoured magic auctions, private estates and shops. He stopped bidding in person long ago, since his presence in showrooms only makes prices levitate.

In tightly packed exhibit rooms spanning two floors of the warehouse one sees a kaleidoscope of props. There's the table with the giant spinning blade that Orson Welles used, during WWII bond drives, to saw Rita Hayworth in half. "People forget that Welles was a great magician," Copperfield explains.

On a shelf sits a stack of five pennies that once passed magically through President Abraham Lincoln's body (not, of course, the last metal objects to pass through Lincoln) when Wyman the Wizard visited the White House. There's the rifle that killed magician Chung Ling Soo onstage during his famous (but not always successful) bullet-catching trick. A turban under glass belonged to psychic Claude Conlin, who gained notoriety in the 1920s as "Alexander, the Man Who Knows." How he knew might have had something to do with the hearing device under the turban that was linked to a microphone in the women's powder room.

Hundreds of playbills and posters, many worth tens of thousands of dollars, are the fastest-appreciating part of the collection. "Demonic figures and occult themes have disappeared from modern magic," notes Copperfield, pointing to an immaculate poster of a still-very-red devil whispering into Harry Blackstone's ear. In the age of Dr. Phil, human psychodrama has replaced the supernatural. Sullen New-Agey street magicians like Criss Angel and David Blaine now use "human potential" lingo to describe the spiritual rigors of three-card monte.

Copperfield remains a throwback, specializing in spectacle. On TV he has caused a plane, a train and the Statue of Liberty to vanish (not at once). For the highlight of his current show he transports someone from his stage to a televised beach in Australia to be reunited with an estranged acquaintance.

He mines his collection for ideas. A coffinlike contraption with pointed steel spikes that Howard Thurston used to impale his assistants has its contemporary counterpart in Copperfield's "table of death" trick. Blackstone's "dancing handkerchief" becomes a virtual bandanna ballet in one of Copperfield's set pieces, and Houdini's "walking through a wall" illusion was replicated for live TV when Mr. Copperfield walked through the Great Wall of China. Can he write his collection off as a business expense? No. The irs disallows that trick.

The highlight of the collection is a display of Houdiniana, including the Water Torture Chamber--purchased at auction in 2004 for $300,000--which required Houdini to escape from a water-filled cell while suspended upside down, and the Metamorphosis Trunk, where he switched places with his assistant.

Filing cabinets groan with letters and documents, including Houdini's death certificate. "It's funny to see that there was just as much backbiting and jealousy amongst magicians then as now," says Copperfield, who's had his share of sparrings. "I have a Houdini letter about how much he hated Harry Blackstone. And yet here's a photo of Houdini's widow being levitated by Blackstone. He must have been spinning in his grave!"

A few groans were heard when Mr. Copperfield cornered the magic market. "David Copperfield buying the Mulholland Library is like an Elvis impersonator winding up with Graceland," one critic complained in the New Yorker in 1993. But it would be curmudgeonly, now, to argue that these holy relics have not found a proper home. Some posters and playbills have been so well restored that they could still pull in crowds off the Boardwalk.

Far off in a corner sits a department store display counter and, on top of it, a homely little wooden coin tray of the sort familiar to any kid who bought a beginner's magic set in the 1960s. "This is one of the first magic tricks I ever bought," says Copperfield, fingering it thoughtfully. He tries to make a quarter appear and disappear. But of the dozens of tricks he has performed for us tonight, this is the only one that balks. He smiles nervously. "There's a little rattling somewhere," he demurs, as the coin's hiding spot is accidentally revealed.

He points to a black-and-white photo that shows a balding man standing next to the same counter. "For 50 years this guy sold magic tricks at Macy's in New York. I used to watch him. With my allowance, this was the first trick I ever bought. Later I found the counter." Twenty-one Emmy awards stand between the young David Kotkin and David Copperfield. But in that instant the boy reappeared, only to vanish as we moved on to the next trick.